Dog Trainer's Log

Image by State Library of New South Wales collection via Flickr

Big conformation classes can last for a half-hour or more. Even though smaller classes are shorter, a dog that wins his individual breed class has a long stretch to look forward to in the Winners ring. At specialities, Best of Breed classes, aka ‘intersex,’ can run 50-75 dogs, and often end up being split into multiple sections. Those are the kinds of classes where Madison, Ch. Kabree Mad About You, learned her default behavior: stand-still-look-pretty (SSLP.)

For her performance career, M.’s long-term stand experience is paying off in her stand and her stays – but SSLP has been a killer behavior to keep in the background during training for rally and obedience. I’ve been seen in public ‘praying’ M. into a sit – you’ve seen other handlers do it, too – tenting their hands together and slowly, repeatedly raising them upwards, hoping the dog will follow. I’ve used my sit-signal in the rally ring, sometimes to no joy. I’ve been seen pantomiming a leash pop (any port in a storm; the important thing is getting the sit!) And in one course, I completely blew a moving down sign because M. gave me a coveted automatic sit when I stopped; I was so blown away that she’d finally put it together that I forgot she wasn’t *supposed* to sit before dropping!

Last weekend at Spaniel Club, I decided to pull M. from a Rally Advanced course after nine stations without a single sit on command. This weekend at the Nickel City Cluster shows, she distractedly made it through Saturday’s relatively breezy Rally Advanced course with and 85 (three sits in the entire course – clearly auto-sits aren’t our only issue!) But today, in a much tougher Rally Advanced course that had NINE sits, a stand and a down in the first seven stations, M. managed another 85, some solid heeling through the two (yes, TWO serpentines) and a beautiful moving drop. Not a single auto-sit, but at least I didn’t have to beg her or pantomime her through any of the sits in the sit-intense first half of the course.

My normal method of working auto-sits are multiple sits in a row, rewarding each individual sit. I combine sits-in-a-straight-line with pivots left and right – one sit, pivot, halt; pivot in the opposite direction; halt. Neither of these methods is doing much to fix the concept of an automatic sit in M.’s sweet spotted brain.

Sits are tough. Anyone can judge them (hard) because they are stationary – worse, it’s tough to get perfectly straight and it’s easy to see crooked. Some people think a crooked sit here or there can’t hurt – but long ago when I was showing Jazz in Open, we ‘pointed out’ because he lost three points (times 11) in a class where he didn’t sit once. That was four missed sits during heeling, and one front and finish for the drop on recall, retrieve on flat, retrieve over the high jump, and one front for the broad jump (he did finish on the broad jump – crooked, but there it was.) The judge didn’t count before calling us back into the ring. I knew I couldn’t possibly have gotten 170 points (200 minus 33 equals NQ.) When he added things up – oops.

In addition to heeling in motion – which M. is steadily hitting these days – M. has to master stationary heel position, the automatic sit. I know that it will come, but she’s having a tough time putting the two concepts of heel position into the same performance.

I’m just glad this weekend didn’t involve “praying for sits.” 

What’s your favorite way to reinforce the automatic sit?